


Light A Single Candle

by mylordshesacactus



Category: Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: 50 Themes, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 07:38:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5959117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylordshesacactus/pseuds/mylordshesacactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn't so much defeat darkness as hold it at bay; but that's enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light A Single Candle

**Author's Note:**

> I played fast and loose with the traditional rules for 50 themes fics, but I hope the result is worth it.

**  
Muzzle**

She meets the skinny anooba five days after walking away, seventeen levels down. He's chained to a pole outside a nightclub that makes Ahsoka's skin crawl from a single glance; the metal cage around his jaw is irresponsibly tight. She reaches out to calm him without thinking—the connection in the Force is easy to make, but after a moment she has to drop her hand and turn away.

His whimpers follow her as he pulls and pulls to no avail, unable to understand his pain or even make it heard, trapped in the dark with nowhere to go.

**Rust**

She's grateful for the catwalks—the shaky lattice of broken grating, abandoned maintenance platforms and precariously balanced junk that forms a disaster waiting to happen, stretching erratically through the underworld. They sway and creak ominously at the slightest hint of a breeze and the less she thinks about why they're sticky to the touch the better, but as long as it doesn't collapse under her weight it's a safer place to sleep than the street.

**Carnivore**

There's a clump of stringy jerky hanging in the corner of a butcher's stall and the leather of her boots looks more appealing, but meat is more expensive than produce and while she doesn't want to be a thief she doesn't want to starve, either....

The stall's owner reaches up and yanks the jerky down to pack it away without noticing the young togruta curled in a second-story alcove. Ahsoka hadn't even reached for the Force, but she flushes with shame anyway.

**Resurface**

She can't hide forever. Even in the lower levels there are news projection screens every few steps, and she'd know Fives anywhere.

**Brand**

She can't bear to see Anakin again; she's not sure she'd have the strength to walk away a second time and she won't go back. But it's not that hard, she thinks with a tinge of bitterness, for a Jedi to slip into a Republic facility through the vents, and Rex's irritation at being prodded awake in the middle of the night vanishes in a grin as he recognizes his commander.

They talk; Ahsoka, woken from her haze of grief, has heard rumors. Despite her hesitation he convinces her to make plans to meet again.

He's not alone, and will not be dissuaded. Rex keeps his jaig eyes. Before long, the others have exchanged the navy of the 501st for a diamond-and-stripes pattern in burnt orange that makes her smile, and breaks her heart.

**Beat**

They're on Mandalore when it happens. 

**Crossfire**

Rex removed his chip; of the twelve who came with him only seven had agreed to the surgery. When it's over, five including Ahsoka remain.

**Orphan**

If the Empire finds her it will kill her, and a Jedi alone travels more quietly then a Jedi in the company of even one clone trooper. They both know it. She promises she'll contact him when she can.

If she can.

**Aftershock**

Her first thought is of her master; the second, more rational one is of Padmé. Eventually she finds herself wrapped in a handmaiden's cloak, a cup of something warm and spiced pressed into shaking hands in the office of a man she's only met once before tonight. All she knows is that Padmé trusted him. She has no choice but to do the same.

**Dignitary**

As new laws, policies, and regional leaders are announced (without any debate, without any input or period of comment) Riyo can do nothing but sit in her pod frozen with horror. It's despotism, it can't be borne—

She's steeling herself to speak when she remembers Padmé. She swallows, sits down quietly. The defiant dead can't help anyone.

**Weak**

Padmé would have spoken anyway. Maybe she really is a coward.

**Patient**

Ahsoka can't leave yet, not until the heat dies down; but she can't stay here, not while people are dying, not when the Empire could show up at Bail's door any minute, she has to go, she can't just sit here and do nothing, she has to—

**Alibi**

Riyo Chuchi goes weak with relief when Senator Organa asks to speak with her; everyone knows what that means, with Pantora still reeling from a Separatist attack mere days before the war ended. Alderaan, for so many people, means _hope_.

They're not alone when he ushers her into his office, and he places a hand on her shoulder and says evenly that they have a lot of work to do.

The aid ships, of course, show up anyway.

**Hostage**

Riyo stands in the Senate, day after day, for years. Every time word reaches Coruscant of rebel activity in one sector or another she feels she would rather claw out of her skin than stay another moment when she could be out _there;_ but if she runs, the Pantoran Senator's place will be filled with one of Palpatine's thugs to punish her world. So she stays, and Bail and Mothma and the others stay, and they cooperate, and they wait.

**Wartime**

The Clone Wars, in what Ahsoka is already thinking of “back then," were fought with _battles._ Even Anakin's surgical-strike missions were carried out with backup, with Star Destroyers in orbit, with orders and rank and mission control and solid objectives. Sometimes she thinks wistfully of air support as she grinds dirt into the battered starfighter she's managed to get her hands on, so it doesn't stand out on backwater worlds.

She walks in and among poor laborers, listening, watching, _sensing_. Making mental notes of what they need, what they dream of, what it would take to mobilize them.

This is a different kind of war.

**Injustice**

Ahsoka wanted to pick her _own_ code name, thank you very much; but apparently Padmé passed along one too many _entirely slanderous_ accounts of her nicknaming abilities, because Bail informs her that her callsign is Fulcrum and won't hear any of her clearly superior suggestions.

**Winter**

Riyo is not called on often; theirs is a fledgeling movement, its wings still wet, a handful of people who dare not know too many others. Still, sometimes she'll get an encrypted message on her secure console and it's addressed to “Crystal” rather than Senator Chuchi. Normally the messenger sent for what little data and funds she's able to offer is one of several young women with a striking resemblance to the late Senator Amidala, all of them calling themselves Falcon; but this time the contact shivering on a dark street corner is taller.

**Respite**

“ _Ahsoka?_ ”

She's pale and exhausted and they can't risk staying more than a moment, but Riyo had never dared hope she was even _alive_. Some of the haunted look melts away as her friend recognizes her, breaks into a smile and hugs her just a little too tightly, a little too long.

**Space**

The galaxy's a big, lonely place, and Ahsoka's beaten-up Headhunter is no comfort even if she _has_ gotten used to sleeping in its cramped cockpit by now. Still, as she jabs the stupid thing into hyperspace and tries to find a position that won't leave seventeen different cricks in her spine by morning she holds onto the memory of Riyo's arms around her, and she can't help but smile.

**Heal**

_Crystal_ isn't a contact she'd been given by Bail, and they can't afford to communicate very often or for very long; but, Force forgive her, she's lost everyone else, and even through a voice modulator it's a balm to hear a friend again. Their calls are short and careful, but they grow more frequent.

**Tyranny**

The Empire's biggest point of pride, as Riyo knows because none of the high-ranking officials ever shut up about it, is its efficiency and the death of the Republic's stifling bureaucracy. If that's so, she can't help but wonder why she has to do twice as much paperwork now than ever, and scowls blearily at her chronometer as she sends a Senate assistant to fetch her more caf.

**Wind**

The next time she's able to see “Fulcrum” in person, a night already expected to be well below freezing has devolved into a full-fledged blizzard; Ahsoka has _never_ known how to dress for snow and Riyo takes one look at the violently shaking Togruta and orders her to spend the night, security risk be damned.

**Paranoia**

Riyo dismisses all of her staff with the excuse that they deserve an early night and instructions to stay warm. She then checks all the blinds several times over, brings out a handheld scanner to check for any bugs that her careful weekly checks might have somehow missed, even drapes a handkerchief over the holocamera on her communications console to be safe. If the Empire somehow learned she'd harbored a rebel agent, let alone a surviving Jedi...

**Appetite**

She turns around to find Ahsoka shrugging out of her too-thin coat, stretching her arms over her head as she sits cross-legged on the floor to bask in front of the fireplace. Riyo really should complete her bug sweep but, well, she's a little distracted.

**Gulf**

At some point in the evening Riyo trails off mid-sentence as she realizes Ahsoka's stopped responding. The look in those ice-blue eyes is soft and piercing at the same time; it's all she can do to keep breathing, and suddenly she feels too close even as something in Ahsoka's expression seems to echo from galaxies away.

**Distribution**

Victory in the Clone Wars was gained with battles—casualties and objectives, weapons and smoke and the remnants of battle droids strewn among wreckage. Ahsoka pulls her cloak tighter around her montrals and watches from a distance as unmarked freighters unload crate after crate filled with vials of antibiotics that mean no more too-small coffins will be filled on this colony tonight.

It doesn't have the same rush, there's no thrill, no vindication, but it's been a harder-won victory than even Umbara.

This is a different kind of war.

**Hate**

The Inquisitors appear slowly; first they seem like a myth, then an exaggeration, and even once Ahsoka accepts their existence she's skeptical. She kills her first when he's in the process of slaughtering a small boarding house full of witnesses, which clears a few things up.

**Blackmail**

“Me? Never,” Riyo says, answering the accusation with a devilishly innocent smile. All she'd said was that if her contact didn't let herself be fed during their exchange, she'd tell their _mutual friend_ that Fulcrum was exhausted and wanted more long, boring stakeout missions. “This is extortion.”

**Admiral**

“You know,” Ahsoka says once as they watch an official Imperial broadcast of Moff Tarkin's newest initiative, “I saved his life once.”

Riyo pats her hand sympathetically. “We all make mistakes, Ahsoka.”

**Teeth**

Neither of them remembers later who moved in for the kiss first. They only know there is a taste of inevitability about it, the two of them like this; Ahsoka pauses for a moment, closes her eyes and Riyo can hear her soft _I can't_ already, braces herself for the pang. But while the next kiss is tender enough to be a farewell it's followed by another, and then another, moving along her jaw with lips and tongue and then sharp fangs scrape gently against her skin and Riyo stops thinking.

**Wake**

Riyo's couch is somehow worse than the old Headhunter, or maybe it's just that her head against Ahsoka's shoulder has made her left arm go numb; still, she manages to extract herself without waking the little Pantoran, at least until she moves to stand. Watching Riyo's face go from disoriented sleepiness to hurt makes Ahsoka's conscience twinge, and she kneels next to the couch to kiss her cheek.

“Go back to sleep,” she says kindly. She's not in the habit of running out on people; but she never meant to stay more than a few minutes this time, and it will be light in just under an hour.

**Bullet**

Riyo's first assassination attempt comes as a surprise; she hadn't thought she was important enough for anyone to bother assassinating. The blaster bolt misses and her guards find and arrest the man behind it; she tries to follow up on the process later and is told she doesn't have the proper clearance. She wonders, but is not foolish enough to say out loud, whether anyone but the Empire would have reason to make such a public statement against known rebel sympathizers.

**Refugee**

Someday they will be called cell leaders, commanders, founders of the Rebellion, someday they will be called the tiny, flickering hope in the darkness that fanned itself into the wildfire that burned the Empire; but in these early years they're just the Senator's contacts, scattered across the galaxy, each praying they're not alone. Each quietly willing to go on if they are.

**Agony**

Some of them—the Falcons, Tempest, Spectre, Quake, Shield and Whirlwind, and people like them—are either in good standing with the Empire, or so anonymous they don't need to be. They have it considerably easier. It's a rare thing for Ahsoka to be able to stop for a drink in even the most distant and dimly-lit spacer bar, and a risk she doesn't dare take often. She's not sure what brings her to this one, until she glances at the flickering Imperial newscast just in time to see ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AGAINST PANTORAN SENATOR RIYO CHUCHI flash across the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

And she doesn't dare call. Doesn't dare make contact in case Riyo is being watched. If known rebel Fulcrum contacts her now, it will sign her death warrant.

She doesn't breathe until “Crystal” calls without warning three weeks later, and is afraid to think about why.

**Bucket**

There's another reason she generally avoids galactic civilization; the first time she passes through an Imperial gate and one of the bored Stormtroopers calls a loud suggestion to his friend about what he should do with the tailhead once his shift is over, she remembers it.

**Gauntlet**

That trip is miserable from start to finish, actually; in the end she and her battered Headhunter just barely manage to force their way into a hyperspace jump with half a dozen TIEs on her tail, and even then she has to drop out of lightspeed after only a few seconds because she hadn't had time to properly program the jump between the dogfight and the Star Destroyer taking potshots. It's the closest she's come to being shot down since the Clone Wars, and her hands are trembling as she reprograms the navicomputer.

**Visit**

She really has no reason to meet Riyo in person this time, none at all, a dead drop would be far safer, but neither of them suggests it. Briefly Ahsoka feels guilty. She knows she should have, she knows she's letting her emotions get the better of her—and the moment she has Riyo out of sight she pulls her close anyway, and kisses her until neither of them can breathe, and lets herself give into them because if she doesn't, she'll shatter.

**Silver**

She can't stay, not for long, but she's had a long time to think about this and she's never been more sure of anything. She drops to one knee, closes Riyo's fingers around her primary lightsaber and ignites the blade across her own throat, offering her life in every way she knows how.

Riyo's hand trembles with the weight of the gift, but the silver-white glow between them doesn't falter enough to burn.

**Charade**

It makes it easier to sit in the Senate, somehow. She can't wear the traditional markings on the inside of her wrists that her people use to show married status, and even if she had montrals she wouldn't be able to risk keeping one of the carved-bone and precious metal bangles Togruta use for the same purpose. But _she_ knows, even as she bows to moffs and governors and speaks earnestly to them about the need for stability and stifling these terrible rebel attacks.

**Circling**

There's nothing special about the Seventh Sister, nothing to earn her more than passing notice; she's an ambitious Inquisitor with average combat skills who thinks she's much more clever than she really is. Ahsoka's mind is halfway back on the Liberator, until the Inquisitor smirks and says she knows Ahsoka's weakness.

“Tell me,” she says, with that unnatural reverberation, and Ahsoka can feel herself pale as a lock of lavender hair is tossed to the dirt between them. “How _is_ Senator Chuchi?”

**Capture**

Riyo Chuchi is not easy to intimidate; she lifts her chin boldly and asks in an even, challenging tone if the Inquisitor intends to play more of her games.

The Seventh Sister smiles sweetly as Riyo's throat closes in on itself, drawing her lightsaber and heat-splintering the window with a gesture.

“Not this time.”

**Shatter**

Riyo just barely has time, as the pressure around her throat lifts, to realize she's being thrown toward the open window and that there is absolutely nothing she can do to save herself. It's almost a relief when she falls short, skidding on the glass-strewn carpet. Sharp nails scratch her neck as a second Inquisitor grabs her by the collar and drags her across the shards, tossing her out the window and into a waiting speeder.

Then the pain hits.

**Possession**

She shrinks back against the wall when the door to the dark holding bay slides open. Riyo's not proud of it, but the pleasure flashing in the Inquisitor's eyes frightens her more than any number of Imperial officers.

She tries to shove the woman away; for her trouble a parrot droid clamps down on her arm in a bruising grip and delivers a shock powerful enough that she tastes her own teeth. The Inquisitor gives a low laugh, grabs Riyo's chin, and pauses just long enough to watch realization and fear build in her expression before leaning in to press a light, taunting kiss to her lips.

Riyo bares her teeth and tries to twist away. The Inquisitor _purrs_.

**Invitation**

The ultimatum comes almost two weeks after Riyo's kidnapping and gives the lie to the Empire's oh-so-earnest calls for investigation and talk of rebel activity. Ahsoka barely listens to the Inquisitor's taunts as gloved talons run down her captive's bruised cheek.

Riyo's _alive_.

**Choke**

Riyo keeps her gaze defiantly forward until hard fingers fist in her hair and drag her head back. Ostensibly, it's to pull her ear closer to her captor. She knows perfectly well the Seventh Sister just wants to make absolutely certain Ahsoka sees the fresh bruise marring her throat.

“Tell your wife where she can come and get you,” the Inquisitor says patiently, sickly sweet, tracing Riyo's jaw with her free hand.

The galaxy needs the Jedi, needs _Ahsoka_ , a lot more than it needs her. “Ahsoka,” she says. “ _Don't_ —”

**Heretic**

She knows what she has to do.

Seventeen years of Jedi teachings taught her that this moment might come. She cannot choose one woman over the galaxy. There are no loopholes, no exceptions. This is one instance where emotion cannot, _must_ not, rule her. She must set aside the image of Riyo, thin and pale, battered, draped in a the scraps of a filthy, bloodstained nightgown, hands bound behind her, forced to her knees while one of the Empire's most sadistic assassins dragged the toe of one boot slowly up her thigh and offered coordinates over the sound of her prisoner fighting to breathe...

She knows what she has to do. She enters the coordinates anyway.

**Hunter**

The Empire takes no chances. It's a long day, a dance with no rehearsal in which a single misstep means the loss of everything, and it takes everything she has—but she is more patient, infinitely more patient, and finally they make a mistake, and she strikes.

After that it's pure instinct, a flurry of flashing red and silver and the fire-orange flash of blaster fire as she springs her traps one by one; there's no time to think or pause or even glance at the little stumbling figure she's herding gradually towards safety, until finally stars blur out around a stolen shuttle and then it's over, it's over, it's over.

**Figurehead**

The cuts and bruises still haven't faded when she makes her first transmission; Ahsoka had worried, but Riyo knows what she needs to do. It's not as if she can go back to the Senate now. So she lifts her chin and clears her throat, and her voice doesn't waver.

“ _This is Senator-In-Exile Riyo Chuchi..._ ”

**Blood**

She doesn't wake screaming; nothing so dramatic. What she does is wake up shaking, heart pounding, clutching Aksoka so hard the fingernails digging into her lekku draw blood; and Ahsoka touches her like glass at first, afraid to make it worse, until Riyo buries her face in her shoulder and sobs and begs to be held. Then strong arms wrap around her like safety and warmth and home.

**Freedom**

It doesn't banish the shadows, not for either of them. The Empire's shadow is too vast to escape so easily. But it doesn't have to. Poems and songs talk about love that sets the galaxy on fire; this, the two of them, they're an ember in the darkness, nothing more.

It's enough. That's all they have to be.

 


End file.
